Well, close enough .. one of my main Production servers is in Mumbai, where they got the Monsoon of the century recently and had to move the server from a ground floor location to a safer location.

Mumbai is 9 1/2 hours ahead of us right now, and will be 10 1/2 hours ahead when we change to Standard Time. The only hard part is trying to do SysAdmin stuff at 3am -- it's a time of day that I'm not at my best.

If we don't get rid of the WTO policies that allow giant corporations to control the flow of jobs without regulation, then it won't matter where you move. These policies do not help U.S. workers, and they do not help the Indian economy in any long term way. The vast majority of outsourced jobs are mindless drudgery (the attrition rate in Indian tech support jobs is over 50%).

Ooops. I gave a serious answer to a non-serious question. Well, I guess I don't find it very funny when people who are lucky enough to live in a developed country pretend that it would be better to live in a country where the life expectancy is 14 years less and the average income is a tenth of what it is in the U.S.

Great link. I sorta had that sense, although not so clearly parablized.

Admittedly, I'm upset that jobs that were formerly done by my co-workers are now moving overseas, but when I step back, I can say "this is free market doing the right thing".

Business needs the ability to contract freely with resources, including the workforce. When regulations are applied, it simply becomes a special-interest tug-of-war, with the biggest contributions (bribes?) to the regulators gaining the most (unfair) ground. In a true free-market, everything will eventually find its own level. It may not be the level you want, or had last year, but it'll eventually level out.

We do. I mean, not actual licensed attorneys at law per se. But law firms can outsource a lot of their research, document preparation, billing, and almost everything else they do that doesn't involve actual lawyering.

...and policiticans?

The Republican party has outsourced some of its fundraising work - does that count?

My current contract finishes in two weeks with someone from India due to start, well a few weeks ago but at least as soon as they get here. The whole site is scheduled to be offshored to India by Christmas this year (2005)...

--Murray BartonDo not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought. -Basho

While I am not impugning the OP's motives, IMHO this poll is in rather bad taste and is beneath the Monastery's standards for inclusiveness and tolerance of diversity. I have generally found PM to be a model in this regard from which the rest of the world could take a lesson...

I concur. While I am sympathetic to folks who lose their jobs to outsourcing, there seems to be a tendency to blame the folks who do the outsourcing and not the folks responsible for deciding to outsource in the first place. IMO if a bunch of Indians get the jobs formerly held by Americans (or whomever) then its the Americans responsible for the decision who should be held responsible. Not the Indian guy (or gal) who is just doing what the rest of us do: trying to earn a living to feed himself and his family.

Id prefer that we stick to conventional controversial subjects like which editor/os is better and why java really is better than perl. :-)

Im assuming the OP didn't think this poll would be offensive, but I'd hope that in the future the folks managing the polls would be more sensitive in future and steer clear of such potentially insulting material.

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other